


Letters From the Sky

by Siha101



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Action/Adventure, Drama & Romance, Eventual Romance, Eventual Smut, F/M, Headcanon, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-20
Updated: 2015-05-20
Packaged: 2018-03-31 08:56:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3971818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siha101/pseuds/Siha101
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lieutenant James Vega is tasked with a very important mission: protecting the great Commander Jane Shepard during her incarceration on Earth. It doesn't take long before he realizes his hero is more than she appears to be and that the scars she bears from her battles are more than just physical. It also doesn't take long for him to realize his feelings for her are more than just hero worship.</p><p>Commander Jane Shepard doesn't know what to make of the young lieutenant. He takes every opportunity to poke and prod her for stories of her past. There's something he's not telling her about him, and she starts to think he wants to talk about his past just as little as she wants to talk about hers. </p><p>When the reapers attack Earth, they are both sent to gather allies for the fight. They will have to face more than the reaper threat; old loves, politics, and a Cerberus plot to control the reapers. Oh, and the fact that their feelings for each other are becoming increasingly hard to ignore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Letters From the Sky

**Author's Note:**

> I got the title from a Civil Twilight song. I feel like it totally encompasses the feel of ME3 perfectly. This fic is also inspired by Paragon Lost, which goes over some of the time Vega spent before he met Commander Shepard.

**Jane**

It was surprisingly hard to not wake up every morning prepared for a battle. Sometimes she woke reaching for her gun in the darkness of early morning before she realized she wasn’t even allowed to carry one anymore. Her stomach twisted just as it always did when the realization came. The Alliance was too busy making her a scapegoat for the fiasco on Aratoht to realize the real problem underlying the incident. The reapers were coming, and they were preoccupied with her court martialing.

It became clear pretty early on that they weren’t planning on really doing anything with her, but keeping her under twenty-four hour surveillance with no access to military intelligence or weaponry was their way of appeasing the batarians and avoiding war. _When will you people figure out that the real war is still coming?_

She would compare it to bashing her head against the wall, but at least that would yield some sort of results. And to add insult to injury, she had been assigned a babysitter. Savior of the citadel and the first human Spectre, and a lieutenant was sent to watch her every move. As if she would even bother to try and contact anyone. Everyone who had ever believed her had scattered to the wind. She had made sure of it, not wanting anyone else to have to pay for being associated with Cerberus or the destruction of an entire system. She dropped a lot of people off on Illium or the Citadel, and made sure that when the Normandy touched down on Earth that Joker and Chakwas wouldn’t be implicated in any way. It was the least she could do after all they had been through.

Breaking from her reverie, Jane Shepard swung her legs over the side of her bed, running her hands through hair wet with cold sweat. She had the same dream the night before as she had most nights lately. She wasn’t sure how much of it had to do with her own knowledge or the weird connection she previously had with the Prothean beacons, but they reminded her of the visions she had.

Reapers closing in, blacking out the sky, and everyone she ever loved dying. She reached for her gun as she woke, but of course, it was never there.

Shaking her head as if it could dispel the tendrils of the nightmare that clung to her waking mind, she gathered a clean set of clothes and a towel and made her way to the bathroom. Lieutenant Vega was already in the kitchen making huevos rancheros as he did most mornings. She slunk into the bathroom before he had the chance to say good morning. Stripping, she stepped under the steady stream of scalding water, letting it wash away the remaining chill from her dream. Her hair had grown quite a bit during the suicide mission and her time in Vancouver Alliance HQ. It now had grown to the bottom of her shoulders, longer than it had been for most of her military career. She was always pretty no nonsense about her appearance, and had always thought of long hair as a little to vane for her busy lifestyle. But now she was anything but busy.

After scrubbing herself clean of all traces of sweat, she stepped out of the shower, drying herself off and slipping into a an Alliance t-shirt and her old BDU bottoms. She wrung the access moisture from her hair, brushing through the tangles before throwing the towel and pajamas into the hamper and joining Vega in the kitchen.

He was already setting two plates out when the sat at the breakfast bar. It was hard to get a read on the soldier. She wasn’t sure if he admired her or hated her. In the beginning it certainly seemed like the latter was true, although his veneer of professionalism kept it hard to call him out. He was only able to hold himself back for a few days before it started. Soon all he wanted to do was ask her question after question about her military service, her time on the Normandy, and her affiliation with Cerberus. It was downright annoying at first, and initially seemed like he was looking for holes in her stories or a way to demonize her the way the Council seemed to want to. Which was why she politely told him to fuck off for the first few weeks. But eventually his persistence wore her down and she gave him scraps of information in attempt to stop his probing. Unfortunately it only seemed to make him more curious. The only positive aspect was his company, which she felt on numerous occasions kept her sane.

She ate in silence, lost in her own thoughts, not wanting to look up at Vega, who had an uncanny ability to sniff out her troubled thoughts and demand she told him what was on her mind. She just wanted to be left alone for a few hours until the mood hopefully passed.

**James**

It was apparently going to be a quiet morning. Shepard made it a point not to look at him. From the minute she emerged from her room, she kept her eyes downcast. She took a short shower, five minutes on the dot every time. He supposed it was ingrained in her after years of time on military vessels. Her hair hung long and damp. It was longer than he had ever seen on the vids he watched of her when reports came back from her on active duty.

He still remembered the first time he had ever heard her name. She was just starting out when she had been recognized for her greatness. She made headlines when she was the sole survivor of an attack that was later confirmed as Cerberus handiwork. Someone tried to interview her shortly after she was rescued, the scars from thresher maw acid still fresh on her hands, neck and face. She had declined to the interview, saying only that her thoughts were with the families of her lost squad members.

It wasn’t long after that when a number of details about the mission were leaked when someone managed hack into some of the Alliance databases. It was clear that Shepard was a hero. Not long after that she was inducted into the N7 program, and soared through the ranks. By age 30, she had her own command and got mission on the maiden voyage of the Normandy. Of course everyone knew what happened after that. Shepard led the most racially diverse team the galaxy had ever seen to defeat Saren and the geth. And became the first human Spectre in the process. And what did she get for it? People called her crazy when she told the council about the reapers. At first, James didn’t want to believe it either. But call it hero worship, he just didn’t think the great Commander Shepard would lie to the entire galaxy when she had so much to lose. It wasn’t long after that she was relegated to hunting down the geth in the Terminus. Mysteriously, her ship was destroyed in the middle of space, the debris coming to rest on Alchera. She was counted amongst the dead. He remembered that day so clearly. He was on active duty when he saw the vids, and remembered journalists trying to interview her surviving crewmates. The turian had been the hardest to watch. He wouldn’t look the camera in the eye, and eventually destroyed the camera after yelling at her to shut the damn thing off.

Her resurrection was the real mystery, and Shepard seemed not to want to share the details, even after his months of prodding.

When he was sent to Fehl Prime, a lieutenant and second-in-command of Delta Squad, his hero worship of Jane Shepard was in full bloom. If he could even be half as good of a leader as she was, he would be successful and inspire his comrades to follow his leadership. He remembered the amount of shit he got for wearing the Normandy SR-1 remembrance pin. His squad mates never let him hear the end of how he idolized the dead marine and her leadership skills.

He had no shame in it, and remembered defending his role model, telling his subordinates that there was nothing wrong with following the example of an exemplary leader and example of the human race. Then everything went FUBAR when the Collectors arrived to wipe out the colony he was supposed to defend. His whole team was killed in the process. He had failed, and there were still many days he woke up wishing that he was dead along with them. After the loss of his squad, he went on leave indefinitely and found himself drinking Omega dry and playing cards.

It was a night that seemed to blur into all the previous ones until he found himself surrounding at the poker table with batarians. It wasn’t long after they announced that Shepard was, in fact, alive and kicking. A program came on in the club, and was interrupted by a reporter named Emily Wong, who announced that the Alliance had a warrant out for Shepard’s arrest, after she allegedly was responsible for the destruction of an entire batarian system. He was drunk at the time, but immediately realized his decision was rash as soon as his tumbler half-full of whiskey turned end over end as it flew through air and shattered the television screen. The batarians present were immediately in an uproar, shouting at him and shoving him, calling him a “Shepard-lover” as if it were the worst insult imaginable. He took two of them out in quick succession, but then his lack of motor control got the best of him. He lucked out when a man in uniform broke up the fight, firing a shot into the air, making the whole bar fall silent.

James had saluted drunkenly when he recognized the alliance uniform and addressed his superior. Anderson was the one that had pulled him from his drunken stupor, telling him he had a job for him. He was about to tell the man where he could put that job offer when he told him what it was, effectively ending the conversation and resulting in Vega taking the first available shuttle to Vancouver.

He stared across the breakfast bar at the reason he was back on the military base. In the beginning, he wanted to hate her. How could the one woman he had looked up to throughout his entire military career be responsible for destruction parallel to genocide? Looking back to when he finally had the nerve to ask that question made him feel ashamed.

“How could you just do that? How can you possibly justify killing hundreds of thousands?”

She pursed her lips, eyes flashing. He knew it was not the first time she had been asked that question. Surely the interrogations brought on by Alliance Command were thorough and brutal.

“I had no choice. They were going to die regardless. I had minutes to spare before the reapers came through the relay. So I destroyed the relay, and sacrificed three hundred thousand the save billions. I will live with that guilt for the rest of my life, but I know I would do it again in a heartbeat.”

And that was when he knew he had gotten himself in deep. Shepard was far more than just the war hero or a criminal. And this was far more than just hero worship.

**Author's Note:**

> So, this is in the third person but the rest of the fic will be written in first person, alternating between Jane and Vega's perspectives.


End file.
